Philip H. Knight Campus (formerly known as Nike World Campus)
June 1-2 | Beaverton, OR
How do we move from lighthouse projects to tipping points? How does a single successful pilot, in a single utility or a single company, become the new normal everywhere?
For an outside perspective on that question, Paul O’Callaghan sat down for a fireside chat with Seth Godin — the author of more than 20 books including Tribes, Purple Cow and The Carbon Almanac, and a longtime supporter of charity: water. Godin has spent his career studying how ideas spread, how change happens, and why some movements tip while others stall.
Paul’s question to him was simple: water professionals have the technology, the case studies, and increasingly the regulatory tailwinds. So why isn’t it tipping faster — and what can the sector learn from how change happens everywhere else?
Godin opened with a reframe that caught the room off guard. Most causes, he pointed out, have an opposition, someone benefits from the status quo, someone is paying to slow things down. Water doesn’t have that problem.
“There is not one single human being who wants there to be less water, or water to be less available and to be less stable,” he said. “We already solved the problem. We just haven’t chosen to use the insights that people in this room have already proven work.”
So if the barrier isn’t invention, what is it? Godin’s answer was a sentence he’s spent decades refining—seven words that, he argued, explain everything from why foot-binding disappeared in China to why high school fashion can flip completely in five years:
Change doesn’t spread because someone wins an argument, he said. It spreads because a group identifies a behaviour as something “people like them” do, and then everyone who wants to belong to that group starts doing it too.
He illustrated it with a story from his own town. A school board budget vote had failed, with only two weeks left before the state would step in. Rather than mount another round of arguments, three residents bought 30 yards of blue ribbon and hung it from the trees along the main street. Within days, the whole town was covered in blue ribbon — and the budget passed two to one. “Not because someone made a logical, conceptual argument,” Godin said, “but because it was very clear that people like us do things like this.”
He connected this directly to the water sector’s own experience with potable reuse. “It takes the leadership of somewhere like Orange County, California, to be first,” he said. “But once it’s been shown once, other utilities can look to their peer and say — okay. And then you’ll see it spreading to Texas, to Florida, and other places.” The early movers matter not just for what they build, but for the permission they give everyone who comes after.
